die, comments, die!!
I just deleted all of the 4353 comments on this blog (and the 17 on the other one), by the simple expedient of replacing the comment.db file with an empty document by the same name. (After all that talk about mySQL I ended up using a flat file database for this blog installation because it was less confusing to set up.) The file was almost 12 MB, for goodness sake; it clearly had to go. I apologize to the posters of the five legitimate comments that this blog had in its early days, you can rest assured in the knowledge that I still have your comments saved, and I will even reinstitute them on the blog if I can ever manage to troll by hand through the 360 pages of database entries I've saved on my machine here.
So let me take this opportunity to say, I hate spam. I really do. This comment spam is bad enough (and it would be far worse if I also had real user comments to worry about) but it's the email spam that's really getting to me now. The filter on my mail client catches about 40 or 50 messages a day, and another five or so get through to bother me; and it's really unacceptable. I'm not tech-savvy enough, I'm afraid, to deal with the problem properly. Right now I'm trying to think of ways to disable my regular email address for a few months and use a backup instead, in the hopes that the bounces would lead the spammers to give up; but even if I did find a way to do that (the difficulty is remembering all the places I used it to sign up for usernames to things) I don't think it would help. I would say I have only myself to blame, since I foolishly posted my address several places on my site where I was young and foolish--it's still there too, I ought to fix that--but even people who's addresses have never appeared anywhere on the internet, that ought to be as pure as the driven snow, have problems with spam. What a sad state of affairs.
ps. Fuitadnet hosting is also a sad state of affairs. Terrible. Never use them, if you're looking for hosting.